The site, known as Cill Mhic Uíleáin, came to wider attention not through excavation but through accident: a storm at the end of the eighteenth century stripped away enough sand to expose seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, quantities of human bone, a slab-lined grave, and the ruins of several structures. Ogham is an early Irish script in which letters are encoded as a series of notches and scores cut along the edge of a stone, most commonly used in the early Christian period to record personal names in a formulaic way. The cluster of stones here, with their recurring formula MAQQI (meaning "son of"), suggests a site where the prominent dead were commemorated across several generations.

The story of what happened next is one of quiet dispersal. In the immediate aftermath of the storm's discovery, John Windele sketched the stones arranged in a rough semi-circle atop the mound; George Chatterton, visiting shortly afterwards in 1839, noted ruined houses lying between the mound and the sea. One structure measuring roughly six by three and a half metres was later proposed as a possible church. But by the mid-nineteenth century, Lord Ventry had removed six of the seven ogham stones from the site entirely. Four of them, inscribed with names including DUBONIRRAS MAQQI TENACI and BROINIONAS, were repositioned to line the driveway to Burnham House, later Coláiste Íde, between Dingle and Ventry. The remaining two passed to the grounds of Chute Hall near Tralee. The cross-inscribed stone, documented in drawings by both Windele and Pelham as early as 1804, has since disappeared altogether. A possible eighth stone noted by Hitchcock has never been re-located.

Only the seventh stone remains at Ballinrannig today, heavily inclined and partially buried in sand, its initial letter now lost beneath the surface. At 1.76 metres high it is the tallest of the group, and scholars including R.A.S. Macalister have worked to reconstruct its damaged inscription, though the final two words of his 1945 reading are openly conjectural. Brash recorded in 1879 that the stone had at some earlier point fallen and been re-erected, which means even its current position is not necessarily original. The mound it stands on, the slab-lined grave, the ghost outlines of houses closer to the sea: enough survives to suggest the scale of what was once here, and how much has been moved, lost, or swallowed back into the sand.